Stories
by skyspireskit3
Summary: “What are monsters but what people make of them?” Three kids discuss their views of the Joker. One-shot.


Inspired by the "Have I Got A Story For You" segment of _Batman: Gotham Knight._ Various references taken from various _Batman _comics_._

Happy Halloween.

Disclaimer: I don't own.

* * *

Autumn in Gotham

sidewalk trees stippled red, saffron  
chilled smog that nips at flesh and eyes.  
The three children,  
Amber, Kidd, and Dane  
wander the streets, free from school when they shouldn't be,  
hot dogs in hand, almost peaceful for once  
when chaos descends.

A jolt shakes the streets, car alarms wail like coyotes  
and a crown of fire appears over the buildings.  
Hot dogs left in the gutters  
the kids take flight, shoving and clawing through the panic of the crowds  
to the one safe place they know.

An old parking garage, long unused, someday to be demolished  
if anyone who counts ever remembers,  
and down, down  
through its well-worn maze they run.  
They run until they can't go any deeper and  
crouching amid the graffiti and fossilized oil smears  
tense as quails listening for dogs,  
they wait.

Years seem to pass, years in the cold concrete gloom.  
They listen hard, but all they hear is the occasional moan  
of wind through the cracks  
and slowly they start to unknot.

Amber is the first to speak. "You think it's the Joker?"  
No one answers for a long time, they glance around as if  
speak the name and the Devil will appear.  
Amber puts her head on her knees. "Oh, God. Oh, God."  
Only Dane, glazed with drugs, is calm. To his way of thinking  
all the world is already dead, all these fires do  
is sweep away the piled kindling of bones.

"He's a psycho, you know," whispers Kidd, the youngest  
only twelve but already  
with cigarette creases under his eyes.  
"He's a…a surrial killer. He cuts people up and feeds 'em to his dogs. He peels off their skins and makes 'em eat each other. He wears pieces of people.  
I _know_.  
I saw him once."  
And Kidd begins, drifting back  
into real or imagined terror, take your pick.

"Sis was in trouble again," Kidd says. "Dunno what it was this time  
prob'ly the drugs again. I go home an' cop cars all outside my house flashin', so I start runnin' the other way.  
I keep runnin' 'till I'm at that old lot where there's that old creepy mansion,  
the one they built for that movie they were makin' way back  
before the director-guy got knifed.  
I know it's su'posed to be cursed but all I'm thinkin' is _cops, cops, cops_  
I find a window, no glass on it, an' I go right in.  
First thing hits me is the smell. Smells like my uncle's place when he's makin'  
his vendor meats and strings the meat up and flies get all over it.  
I'm in, my shoes squish on something, looks like canned dough  
like brains in the movies, this was a movie set, right?  
It's dark can't hardly tell where I'm goin'.  
I hear somethin'.  
Then there's a man comin' towards me. Stumblin' and staggerin'. I think he's only wearin' gloves.  
Then he gets closer I see it's not gloves  
it's his _skin_, only skin left on his _whole body_. I don't wanna know where the rest of it went.  
I'm runnin' my shoes squishin' through more stuff I know ain't movie props now.  
I see _dogs,_ big Hellhound dogs, bone bits and blood fallin' from their jaws an'  
their eyes just shoot fire  
an' I'm runnin' faster with their breath burnin' on my jeans an' the walls're all funhouse mirrors so _everything_  
blood and dogs an' their fangs an' drool an' red eyes, all around me  
corkscrewin' on forever.  
I pass huge hooks with people speared on 'em  
some still twitchin', grabbin' at me  
people with all their skins torn off like the gloves-guy, some on the floor starved and skinny an' chewin' on strips of skin, their own cut-off skin. Some people're eatin' other people's skins.  
I see a giant jack-in-the-box box with half a corpse hangin' out, bobbin' on the huge spring, all swole up.  
I run right into this mirror it _moves_ and then I'm in this other room  
dogs behind the wall behind me. Scratchin', growlin'.  
Before it was so dark, now it's so bright I almost go blind. Blood _everywhere_  
I can smell it fryin' on the lights.  
Limbs hangin' from the ceiling.  
An' then I see _him._  
_The Joker._  
His back to me wearin' a white smock all bloody. In front of a mirror  
cuttin' up his face with a knife. He's opening up those scars on his face wider an' wider. A pile of teeth, people's teeth, by his elbow, and he's pickin' 'em up  
and stickin' them into his gums, cuttin' cuttin' makin' room for the new teeth makin' himself a bigger grin. Bigger bigger.  
He sees me  
he _grins_  
it stretches up to his eyes, this crazy quilt stripe of new teeth an' old  
an' I'm runnin, I'm _runnin_'…"

On and on Kidd goes, so lost in his story  
it doesn't matter  
if it's even true or not.

"That's not it," Amber snaps, nerves making her short.  
"He's not a Leatherface like you say. He's a psycho, but it's not his fault."  
Amber has a hole in her head, a parting gift from a mugger  
who had never held a gun before  
and sometimes she hears locusts, sometimes she sees streetlights twist  
into balloon animals and faces  
only she knows.

She pushes her glasses up her face.  
"You probably remember the old chemical plant. By the docks.  
You know I used to go down there. When Mom…got weird. All that dark water around. The city sounded far away. Just me. It was nice.  
Those plants empty their crap right into the river, you know. Hope you've never drunk the water.  
I don't remember when it was, but I remember I was walking along the shore. Some distance off, I saw this hand shoot up out of the water. This white hand. Just white as bone against all that black. And this guy pulled himself out.  
I'd always wondered what happened if you fell into one of those vats, if you went mutant or if you just died. And now I saw.  
His skin was hanging off him in flaps. Crumbling off and smoking and leaving these big raw patches. I could smell him from where I was, rotten eggs-chemicals and flesh burning.  
His eyes were bleeding, I swear. And he was making noises. Howls. Shrieks. I couldn't tell if it was laughter or crying.  
I just stood there. I couldn't move. He didn't see me, just stumbled on past me and away. Can't believe he didn't hear my heart thudding. It was all _I_ could hear.  
That was _him_. I know it was.  
He wears that makeup  
'cause he doesn't have a face underneath. Whatever he was before got burnt up in all those chemicals. He can't cry, so he laughs instead.  
Maybe he wants everybody to laugh with him. Before they die. Before he kills them.  
Maybe he's found something he thinks people need. Maybe he knows really why comedy and tragedy  
are Chinese finger-trapped together.  
Maybe he wants to show everybody how to dance in our tears.  
To laugh through our screams. Maybe he thinks  
he's helping people.  
Maybe he thinks he's liberating people.  
Maybe he can't tell anymore  
it's all wrong. Or what if he's right? Which is worse?"  
She hugs her bony knees and shakes her head, as if trying  
to shake loose an itch.  
"Everything's always hazy," she murmurs, rubs her good eye. "But sometimes I wonder  
if maybe _I'm_ the one out of focus.  
It's all so wrong."

Amber looks perilously close to falling, as she sometimes does  
into that hole in her brain  
so Kidd snaps her back with a disbelieving snort.  
They argue until Dane's drugged head shakes  
through its halo of smoke, firmly as a slamming door.  
The oldest of them, he's all spiny angles, wears his hair long, long  
and doesn't care what you think. The drugs add white oil to his words.  
Like any sage, he lets the mortals vent and jabber first  
before cutting them down with his wisdom.

He takes a puff.  
"You guys keep talkin' about Him like he's human  
and therein is the mistake.  
Clown Crime Prince, Laughing Leper, whatever you wanna call Him,  
'cause only by giving something a name can we start to see it,  
but we can't see The Joker, we can't face Him 'cause He's all of us, every part of us that makes us cry  
when we look in the mirror. He's everything bad  
that's been poured into this city  
since it first grew out of ground.  
I don't mean all our pollution and waste,  
I mean all the spray-paint hate and the rapes, the fear and the graves in the river.  
Nobody can see it all, so we think of it in bits and corners  
but it does add up and it becomes a monster, it's what that monster feeds off  
the blood flooding our streets is His nectar,  
our dying screams His sonata.  
He's like nature's wrath, the one thing we can't ever control, the one thing we can't ever stop, not with all our machines and gadgets and brains.  
We can't kill Him 'cause He's destruction itself, a Chaos-God  
He's what lives inside us all, will always live inside us,  
behind what drives us to pull every trigger, stab every back.  
Immortal like we'll never be.  
I've seen Him walk through fire without being burned,  
I've seen Him lay waste to fields of life with a glance,  
I've seen the end of the world and He's there looking back at me.  
And the Batman? The Batman is the one part of us  
that has any strength, the one part that dares to stand up  
and fight back, but that part can't match  
the size of this hate, and in the end the Batman'll be just another speck  
of imaginary dust beyond the horizon.  
To fight Him, we have to turn the struggle inward first  
tear out from inside what fuels Him  
before it metastasizes any more. But we won't, we never do,  
we'll just keep on feedin' Him 'till He brings the Earth down on top of us  
'cause the eyes in the looking glass hurt too much  
and that's all there is to tell."

Amber and Kidd listen, but they can tell  
where he starts to slip from the realm of philosopher  
into just plain fog,  
and they take it all in doses.

For a while they sit quiet, trying not to look into the shadows  
that seem to bare fangs and stalk around them.  
Then they start again, the ancient tradition of driving back  
the dark with stories, talking more of evil, futures, monsters, bat-men and clowns,  
spinning bonds to fill the festering holes  
made by childhood torn away too soon.  
Language is all that Dane believes in, and he says  
not even the nothingness at Earth's end  
can silence every voice that ever was.

...

Above them, in the rafters  
lounged like a jungle beast  
over its edible kingdom  
the Joker himself listens in.  
Singed from his own recent explosions, he smiles beneath closed eyes  
as the voices of the children float to his perch.  
He doesn't mind as he hears his name  
being taken and warped, just the opposite.  
For who can appreciate a good story, unencumbered by bars  
of such worthless things as truth  
more than he?  
And he licks the secrets in his scars.

Before long, the stories trickle to a close and carry off  
on fading sneakered footsteps.  
He could let them go, let them spill their tales elsewhere  
through the streets and undergrounds, gasoline splashes to the fear  
that gives ease to his invasion of Gotham's shadow-shy crime elite  
and zest to the world  
or  
he could help them.  
Hopeful storytellers, he could give them  
a true tale of terror  
something for all to see, clear in hieroglyphs carved into young flesh  
for those creative young minds to bloom in recount  
into the things nightmares are pieced from,  
something to truly wipe the false sunshine  
from what remains of Gotham's dreams. And all who hear will fall to their knees  
futile prayers flung like salt  
to stave off those unstoppable ghouls.

Yes, that's it, that's good. After all,  
what are monsters  
but what people make of them?

Knife in hand, he follows.


End file.
